No More Mrs. Nice Mom

There was bound to be some push back. All the years of nurturance overload simply got to be too much. The breast-feeding through toddlerhood, nonstop baby wearing, co-sleeping, “Baby Mozart” co-watching; the peer pressure for never-ending singsong-voiced Mommy niceness, the ever-maddening chant of “good job!”; compulsory school “involvement” (that is, teacher-delegated busywork packaged as a way to Show Your Child You Care), the rapt attendance at each and every school performance, presentation, sporting event — the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting.

The reaction came in waves. There were expert warnings, with moralists claiming that all this loosey-goosey lovey-dovey-ness was destroying the hierarchical fiber of the American family, and psychologists writing that all that self-esteem building was leading to epidemic levels of pathological ninnyishness in kids. Then there was a sort of quasi-hedonist revolt, cries of rebellion like Christie Mellor’s “Three Martini Playdate,” mother-toddler happy hours (postpregnancy liberation from “What to Expect” sanctimony!) and take-the-kid-out-all-night hipster parenting. Then came “free range” parenting, an appellation with the added advantage of sounding both fresh and fancy, like a Whole Foods chicken; “simplicity parenting” (recession-era lack of cash dressed up as principled rejection of expensive lessons); and, eventually, a kind of edgy irritation with it all: a new stance of get-tough no-nonsense, frequently called — with no small amount of pride — being a “bad” mother.

“Bad,” of course, is relative. “I’m such a bad mother” these days tends to be a boast, as in, “Can you believe that I just said, ‘Not now,’ to my 4-year-old?” The un-self-questioning 1960s-era mother — she of the cream-of-mushroom soup in a can — evokes wistful memories. “Surrendering to motherhood” is over; as a cautionary tale, this spring HBO is running a new miniseries of “Mildred Pierce,” a Todd Haynes remake of the 1945 Joan Crawford film, in which Kate Winslet will play a mother whose life is devoured by her attempts to meet the demands of her grasping, never-satisfied daughter. (“She gave her daughter everything,” the tagline for the trailer reads. “But everything was not enough.”)

The new toughness is only partly about saving Mom’s sanity. A bigger goal is producing tougher, more resilient and (of course) higher-performing kids. “You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you,” writes Amy Chua in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a just-published parenting memoir that clearly aspires to become a battle plan for a new age of re-empowered, captain-of-the-ship motherhood.

“Tiger Mother” is the story of a woman who runs her daughters’ lives with an iron hand, breaking every rule of today’s right-thinking parenting (praise your kids, never compare them to one another, don’t threaten to burn all their stuffed animals if their piano practice is imperfect, don’t tell them they’re “garbage”), all in the guise of practicing Chinese parenting, which, in contrast to the flaccid, touchy-feely Western variety, stresses respect, self-discipline and, above all, results. Chua, who is Chinese-American and a Yale law professor, pushes her children to get straight A’s, forces them to spend hours each day practicing piano and violin; they are not allowed to pursue loser activities like playing the drums, “which leads to drugs,” she says, in a typical turn of phrase that may or may or may not be facetious. She refuses them playdates and sleepovers and TV and video games, and she demands unstinting obedience and devotion to family, all of which leads, unsurprisingly, to no small amount of crying, screaming and general tension.

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(“I don’t want this,” Chua says, in one particularly memorable moment, when her 4-year-old daughter, Lulu, gives her a birthday card that, the mother judges, couldn’t have taken “more than 20 seconds” to make. “I want a better one — one that you’ve put some thought and effort into. . . . I deserve better than this. So I reject this.”)

Despite the obvious limits of Chua’s appeal, her publisher is clearly banking on her message finding wide resonance among American moms worn out from trying to do everything right for kids who mimic Disney Channel-style disrespect for parents, spend hours a day on Facebook, pick at their lovingly prepared food and generally won’t get with the program. The gimmick of selling a program of Chinese parenting is a great one for a time when all the talk is of Chinese ascendancy and American decline. (If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, kids; not for nothing does Chua make sure that her own children take the time to become fluent in Mandarin.) And there is true universality behind the message she’s honest enough to own: that she is terrified of “family decline,” that she fears that raising a “soft, entitled child” will let “my family fail.” Her deepest hope is that by insisting upon perfection from her children in all things, like violin playing, she will be able to achieve, in her words, control: “Over generational decline. Over birth order. Over one’s destiny. Over one’s children.”

The terror of losing ground is the ultimate driving force in the middle- and upper-middle-class American family today, and however unique Chua’s elaboration of it (simply by marrying a Jew, and not a Chinese man, she worries that she is “letting down 4,000 years of civilization”), however obnoxious and over the top her attempts to cope, she is hardly alone in believing that, in her carefully considered ministrations, she will find the perfect alchemy that will allow her to inoculate her kids against personal and professional misfortune.

Through all the iterations of Mommy madness, “good” and “bad,” this article of faith always remains intact: that parents can have control. Developmental neuroscientists may talk of genes and as-yet-undiscovered-and-hence-uncontrollable environmental factors that affect the developing fetus, social scientists may talk of socioeconomic background and the predictive power of parents’ level of education — the rest of us keep hope alive that parental actions, each and every moment of each and every better-lived day, have the ultimate ability to shape a child’s life outcome. The notion that parental choices — for early-onset Suzuki or otherwise — have this uniquely determinative effect is, in light of current research, almost adorably quaint, akin to beliefs that cats must be kept out of a baby’s bedroom at night lest they climb into the crib and suck away the child’s breath. But it remains part and parcel of modern mother love.

Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 16, 2011, on Page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: No More Mrs. Nice Mom. Today's Paper|Subscribe